Dear Everyone,
Below is a call for contributor for a series of sessions at this year's RGS-IBG Annual Conference focusing on how human geographers use notes and notebooks
Best,
Alan Latham
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Inside the Notebook — learning together from empirical instances
Russell Hitchings, Alan Latham and Tatiana Thieme
Sponsored by Area, as part of its ‘Thinking with Method’ series
A crit based session for the RGS-IBG conference Tuesday 30 August to Friday 2 September 2022
The range of observational and analytical notes taken by human geographers is diverse. These notes might include or combine mnemonic notes to trigger the memory of a moment, depictions of observed patterns in a given social space, sketches of notable scenes and witnessed interactional encounters, or long-form reflective writing that is done after a field encounter as we develop our hunches in comparative privacy or on our return from research. And, just as they take on different forms, field notes and the notebooks that contain them can do multiple things for us as researchers; they record initial impressions of a site, work as a means of systematically recording specific actions, provide appealing ethnographic ‘texture’ and ‘thick descriptions’ that might bring the writing alive later on, offer a space where preliminary speculations are tested, or include a series of asides that detail the affective musings of researchers trying to make sense of their impressions. And sometimes it is not as strategic as all that. Sometimes we just start making notes in the hope that eventually they’ll take us somewhere useful.
Yet there is surprisingly little discussion within the discipline about how to take ‘field notes’, and the different ways in which field notes and notebooks evolve into the polished, published, research accounts that we present to our peers (Walsh, 2009). There are excellent introductory texts both within the discipline (Cook and Crang, 2007) and elsewhere (Emerson et al. 2011). Still, while we may be well aware of the dilemmas of working with such material (Murphy et al., 2021; Tavory and Timmermans, 2014), when we get to our finished research accounts, concrete discussion of how field notes were produced and analysed or proved more generally helpful is scant at best (Hitchings and Latham, 2021). Despite this, it is likely that many of us have learnt tricks and strategies for taking and working with field notes in our careers even though we may not have felt obligated to discuss them in papers or have been understandable reticent about revealing our faltering analysis process.
In the spirit of fostering a more open and expansive approach to discussing how human geographers actually go about doing their research, we invite contributions for two panel based ‘crits’* on working with research note books. The crits will involve participants presenting one or two extracts of notebook-based empirical material generated from their research work to an audience of sympathetic peers. This material may be from notes taken whilst directly in the research site, from more ‘polished’ notebooks, or from a combination of both. Panel participants will be asked to briefly present their notebook extracts highlighting a key issue or dilemma from those notes, and audience members will then respond to the extracts. As we are also interested in the temporality of our field-noting strategies and styles, we are also aiming for a mix of established and more junior scholars; presenting material from both on-going or completed research projects. We hope to open up some new avenues for talking candidly and supportively about how we practically undertake our ‘data collection’, connecting with the journal Area’s long standing tradition as a site for discussion and debate on method in human geography (Geoghagen et al. 2020; Latham 2021). The sessions builds on some enjoyably candid and supportive sessions on ‘The spoken word’ at last year's RGS-IBG Annual Conference that have since been evolving into a special section for Area.
If you are interested in participating in the proposed sessions, please send a few sentences about what an excerpt with a short description of what is interesting / worth discussion in this excerpt to Alan Latham ([log in to unmask]). Then, on the day, we’ll discuss them as part of a crit. Obviously, what is interesting about the excerpt doesn’t need to be all wrapped up before we come together. The crit sessions are about talking with one another about what our notes do for us, so the excerpts are there to help us see how our colleagues actually do their work and learn from comparing approaches. Because the idea is to present an excerpt, rather than a paper, our idea is that those who are already at the conference might also be willing to pause and take the time to chat about research practice with us. The idea is that this should be both fun and helpful. We think they were last year!
Excerpts might relate to:
• Experiments with different kinds of note-taking
• The feelings that come when we write notes
• Changing tack in our note-taking strategies
• Where we take our notes and how that matters
• When we take our notes and how that matters
• Technologies for taking notes and how they matter
• Who gets to see our notes, who doesn’t, and why
• How we use notes to develop analytical arguments
• Note-taking as an individual or a collective endeavour
• Different kinds of notebooks
Please send expressions of interests of no more that 200 words explaining the notebook extract you'd like to present, and why it is of interest, to Alan Latham ([log in to unmask]) by Friday March 18. NB. presentations in the crit sessions will be treated as panel contributions, so if you are already presenting a paper at the RGS-IBG conference you can still send us a proposal.
References
Crang, M., & Cook, I. (2007) Doing Ethnographies. London: Sage.
Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (2011) Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. University of Chicag.
Hitchings, R., & Latham, A. (2020) Qualitative methods II: On the presentation of ‘geographical ethnography’. Progress in human geography, 44(5), 972-980.
Geoghagen, H., Hall, S. M., Latham, A., & Leyland, J. (2020) Continuing conversations: Reflections on the role and future of Area from the new editorial team. Area, 52(3), 462-463.
Latham, A. (2020). Thinking with method: qualitative research in human geography. Area, 52(4), 666-667.
Murphy, A. K., Jerolmack, C., & Smith, D. (2021) Ethnography, data transparency, and the information age. Annual Review of Sociology, 47, 41-61.
Pacheco-Vega, R. (2019) Writing field notes and using them to prompt scholarly writing. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 1609406919840093.
Tavory, I., & Timmermans, S. (2014) Abductive Analysis: Theorizing qualitative research. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Walsh, K. (2009) Participant observation in Thrift et al. (eds). International encyclopedia of human geography. London: Elsevier. 77-81.
* What’s a crit you may be asking? A crit involve the presentation of something—an idea, a design, an analysis—to an audience of engaged peers. It’s something we’ve borrowed from architectural and design practice. So far as we know the crit is not a presentational form that is widely used to discuss research material in human geography. Compared to the standard paper, we think it is a nice way of helping us talk more openly and supportively about the nitty gritty of field research.
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